China’s Foreign Patent Filings in Pharmaceutical Industry Enters the Top 3 in the World

Date:2016-11-01

At the National Conference on Innovation in Sanitation and Health, the achievements that Chinese pharmaceutical industry has made in self-innovation during the 12th Five Year Plan period attracted great attention from the whole society. In the past five years, china's foreign patent filings in pharmaceutical industry have entered the top 3 in the world, which reflected remarkable improvement in IP competence and paved the way for Chinese enterprises being integrated in global market and taking a place in global industry chain. It is due to the driving force of external environment as well as urgent need for internal development of Chinese pharmaceutical enterprises.

"Pharmaceutical industry is a high-input and long cycle industry. It is essential for pharmaceutical enterprises to master core patents through R&D and promote their patented drugs to get the certificate of international drug registration", said Xue Yunli, vice president of Shandong Green Leaf Pharmaceutical Group Co., LTD. She added that in the project approval and R&D process of new drugs, the intellectual property department arranged special staff in charge of foreign-related patent affairs who focus on studying domestic and international patent laws and regulations, facilitating the layout of patents globally and expanding overseas market in a bid to realize the utmost value of IP of the company.

"Facing the impact of international pharmaceutical giants entering Chinese market, the traditional Chinese medicine enterprises need to transform their view of the development", Lu Xianfeng, assistant general manager of Yangtze River Pharmaceutical Group. As he indicated, a few years ago the company made adjustment by relying on IP to develop and innovate chemical medicine, traditional Chinese medicine and biological medicine. Guided by such IP strategy, the percentage of export volume of chemical medicine in the company's total sales and its international market share have increased year by year.

"In recent years, international biological industry has witness explosive development, however domestic pharmaceutical industry has a low level in IP development and lack of initial innovation capability which need a "master key" to address these problems." In his perspective, it is important to improve the IP strategy and break the bottleneck of initial innovation, so that the company can realize development as well as transformation and upgrading driven by innovation.

"The formulation of a complete IP management system is key to a pharmaceutical company and a basis for all initial innovation", said Ma Rujian, vice president of Yaoming Kangde New Drug Development Co., LTD. On the basis of patent technology, the company constantly filed more patent applications and formed a sound cycle of patent protection.

The conference gave guidance on the future development of Chinese pharmaceutical enterprises. It calls for giving full play to the role of innovation subjects, enhancing IP protection awareness, conducting in-depth study on appraisal and standard formulation and promoting technology transaction and IP protection. Only by giving great attention to IP, can Chinese pharmaceutical enterprise prevail in the future development.